SEO For Financial Services: A Complete Guide To Ranking Higher In 2025
Search is the primary starting point for financial services clients. 90% of loan and mortgage seekers, 85% of check cashing customers, and 76% of those filing tax returns all begin their journey with an online search.
And if you’re not showing up when these searches happen, you’re missing out on more than just clicks. You’re missing qualified leads actively looking for the services you offer.
This is where search engine optimization (SEO) can help. Done right, it helps your firm appear in searches, establish trust, and convert more browsers into paying clients.
In this article, we’ll break down how you can approach SEO for financial services with proven strategies that make both Google and your clients happy.
What Is SEO for Financial Services?
Financial services SEO is all about helping your firm get found on search engines like Google by people actively looking for the services you offer, not just anyone who happens to see an ad.
That could be assistance with managing wealth, planning for retirement, applying for a mortgage, or figuring out what to do with a tax return.
It’s the process of improving your financial services website so that it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords.
94% of all clicks on Google go to organic search results, emphasizing that ranking on the first page is essential to capture the majority of traffic.
For example, if someone searches Google for “financial advisor near me” or “best tax consultant in California”, your firm will want to show up on the first page of search results.
But SEO for financial services isn’t just about traffic. It’s also about attracting the right kind of traffic. You want people who are actively searching for trustworthy, professional help.
That means your SEO strategy needs to be laser-focused on building credibility, targeting high-intent keywords, and creating content that solves real problems.
Why is this important? Because most people don’t scroll past the first page of Google. They search, click, and call. And if your competitors in the financial services industry are investing in
SEO while you’re stuck relying on referrals alone, you’re probably missing out on a steady stream of qualified leads.
Understanding Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) for Financial Services
If you’ve dipped your toes into SEO before, you’ve probably come across the term YMYL, which is short for Your Money or Your Life.
In the world of SEO, YMYL refers to content that could impact a person’s finances, health, safety, or overall well-being. Naturally, this includes just about everything in the financial services sector, from mortgage advice to investment strategies and even retirement planning.
If you’re telling someone what to do with their money, Google wants to make sure you have expertise on this topic.
Google holds YMYL content like yours to much higher standards than other content. This is because bad financial advice can have real-world consequences.
If someone acts on misleading or low-quality content, they could lose their savings, miss out on benefits, or get hit with tax penalties.
So, how does this impact your SEO strategy? It means you need to focus on what Google calls E-E-A-T:
Experience: Have you actually practiced what you’re writing about?
Expertise: Do you know your stuff inside and out?
Authoritativeness: Are others citing you or linking to your content? This is known as backlinks, which we’ll chat about later.
Trustworthiness: Can users and search engines rely on your advice?
Failing to meet YMYL standards can hurt your rankings and impact your reputation.
But when you get YMYL right, you don’t just get on the right side of Google, you build trust with real people who are deciding whether to put their financial future in your hands.
Proven SEO Strategies Search Engines Love
Now that you understand more about financial services SEO, let's unpack some powerful strategies to boost your rankings:
Linkbuilding: Earn trust with backlinks
In financial services SEO, backlinks act like votes of confidence. When more high-quality websites link to your content, Google sees your site as trustworthy, authoritative, and worth ranking in search results.
A backlink is a hyperlink from another website that points to your site. For example, if an accounting blog links to your guide on tax savings strategies, that’s a backlink. And if that blog happens to be respected in the finance space? That’s even more powerful.
85% of websites ranking on page one of Google for a broad set of keywords have more than 1,000 backlinks from unique domains, indicating that a high volume of quality backlinks is common among top-performing pages.
Backlinks also help with YMYL because they prove that your content is credible, and it shows search engines that others trust your content enough to reference it.
Let’s look at some link-building strategies that are perfect for financial service providers to earn high-quality backlinks:
Contribute to authoritative finance publications
Pitch guest articles and thought leadership to industry sites, local business journals, or financial news platforms. When you contribute these expert insights, you build credibility, earn a backlink from a trusted domain, and get your name in front of potential clients.
Start by identifying publications that your target audience reads, like Investopedia, MoneyWeek, or niche sites related to your service offering. Tailor your pitch to each outlet, focusing on value rather than promotion, like the fact that your blog post will solve a real-world problem or guide readers to a solution to their pain points.
Create educational, link-worthy content
Want people to link to your site organically? Then you need to give them something worth linking to, also known as linkable assets.
This could be an in-depth guide to choosing the right pension plan, a mortgage calculator tool, a visual explainer of how compound interest works, or a jargon-free glossary of financial terms.
When your content genuinely helps people, it becomes a natural magnet for backlinks.
Use Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a free platform where journalists send out requests for expert sources. You respond with a helpful quote and, if selected, you get mentioned (and usually linked) in their article.
For financial advisors, accountants, or insurance professionals, this is a golden opportunity to get featured in high authority publications, build brand recognition, and earn contextual backlinks that boost your SEO.
Partner with complementary businesses
Team up with professionals in fields related to yours, like lawyers, real estate agents, or tax consultants, to create co-branded content, webinars, or referral guides.
These kinds of partnerships often come with natural, relevant backlinks from your partner’s website to yours (and vice versa).
Get listed on reputable financial directories
Many trusted directories offer backlinks that carry SEO value. We’ll talk more about how to get listed in directories later on.
An example of linkbuilding for financial services
This financial planning firm has developed a linkable asset in the form of a mortgage calculator. As it is a genuinely helpful tool, it has earned over 100 backlinks:
Keyword research: Find the words your clients use
In simple terms, keyword research is the process of finding the exact words and phrases your target audience types into Google when they’re looking for financial advice, services, or answers.
It’s about speaking your clients’ language, not the technical jargon you use in the office.
And here’s the big deal: all your financial services SEO efforts should start with keyword research as it influences the content you create, how you optimize your web pages, and even how you structure your site.
The types of keywords finance companies should target
Below are some of the best types of keywords you should be targeting in your SEO strategy:
Local keywords: If you offer in-person or location-specific services, local keywords are your bread and butter. These could include searches like “mortgage broker in Miami” or “best accountant near me”. These are high-intent searches from people who are ready to act.
Service-based keywords: These are tied directly to the services you offer. They help your service pages rank and often carry strong commercial intent. Examples include “retirement planning services” or “tax advisory for small businesses”.
Informational keywords: These keywords capture people earlier in the decision-making journey. They’re not quite ready to convert, but they’re researching. Think “how much to save for retirement by 40” or “what is a pension drawdown”.
This financial services business is targeting the informational keyword “what is group life insurance” in its resources section on its website:
Branded and competitor keywords: Don’t forget to monitor keywords related to your own brand, as well as your competitors’. For example, “best alternative to XYZ Wealth Management”.
Niche-specific keywords: If you specialize in a certain audience, like expats, freelancers, medical professionals, or tech founders, target the niche keywords they’re using. Examples are “tax planning for medical professionals” or “investment strategies for startup founders”.
On-page SEO: Make every page a ranking machine
While backlinks and keywords can help you see SEO success, on-page optimization is where you can ensure each individual page on your website is optimized for both search engines and users.
It’s about making every element on your site, from headings to images, work well. Let’s look at a few key areas that financial services providers should nail:
Title tags and meta descriptions
You can think of your title tag and meta description as the first impression your website makes. These are the snippets that show up in SERPs, and they often determine whether someone clicks through to your website or keeps scrolling.
Title tags should include your target keyword, be clear and concise, and match the content of your page. They also shouldn’t be longer than 60 characters to avoid getting cut off in search results.
Meta descriptions should give users a reason to click by focusing on benefits or outcomes, include a keyword naturally, and stay under 155 to 160 characters.
Below is an example of a keyword-rich title tag (the clickable heading on top) and a compelling meta description (the blurb below):
Dedicated service pages
A common mistake financial institutions make is trying to cram all their services into one “What We Do” page. Instead, create a separate, fully optimized page for each core service you offer.
For example, if you offer both inheritance tax planning and investment management, each should have its own page on your website.
This gives you more chances to rank for service-specific keywords, clearer messaging for users, and a stronger internal linking structure.
This financial services site includes dedicated pages for each of its services, one of which is wealth management:
Image SEO
Images make your website look professional, but they can also improve your SEO if you optimize them properly. Here’s what to do:
Use descriptive file names. For example: “financial-planner-florida.jpg” instead of “IMG1234.jpg”.
Add alt text that clearly describes the image and includes a relevant keyword where appropriate. This could be something like “Financial advisor meeting with a couple to discuss retirement planning”.
Compress image sizes to improve site speed.
Technical SEO: Keep your site in top shape
You can think of technical SEO as the maintenance that keeps your website running smoothly. While you can have the best content and the most attractive design, if your site loads slowly or Google can’t understand your pages, you’re not going to rank.
Technical SEO can be tough to get right so you may want to hire a professional to help you with this. But there are some key technical optimization activities you can start with:
Schema markup
Schema markup code that helps search engines better understand your website content. Think of it as adding labels to your website’s information so Google knows what’s what.
For financial services providers, schema can help highlight things like your business’s contact information, reviews and star ratings, FAQs, and local business details in search results.
When done right, schema can also enhance your search results with rich snippets, which are those little extras like stars and pricing that make your result stand out and potentially earn more clicks.
This financial services company may be using schema on its website, as its search result displays as a rich snippet with extra information:
Site speed
If your website takes more than a couple of seconds to load, people will leave it, and it’ll hurt your rankings.
Google considers site speed as a ranking factor, and slow pages can increase bounce rates and frustrate potential clients.
Also, pages loading in one second or less achieve conversion rates of about 39% compared to 34% at two seconds and 29% at three seconds load time.
Here’s how to speed things up:
Reduce the types of code called CSS and JavaScript.
Use browser caching and a content delivery network (CDN).
Choose a quality hosting provider (cheap hosting often comes with slow speeds).
You can test your site speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. They’ll even give you specific fixes to implement.
Mobile friendliness
Mobile queries related to financial planning and management have grown by 70% in two years. So, if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re not just going to lose out on rankings. You’re also turning away potential clients.
Here’s what a mobile-friendly site looks like:
Text is readable without zooming in.
Buttons are easy to tap.
Menus are clean and easy to navigate.
Pages resize properly on different screen sizes.
Local SEO: Show up where your clients are searching
Local SEO is critical to earn trust from search engines and potential clients alike. It’s important that your business appears trustworthy and credible due to the services you offer, and showing up in local search results can help you do this.
When someone searches “financial advisor near me” or “mortgage broker in Florida”, they’re not looking for a blog post about compound interest. They’re looking for someone local who they can trust with their hard-earned money.
28% of local searches lead directly to conversions, highlighting how important local SEO is.
Local SEO is all about optimizing your online presence so that you show up in local search results, especially in Google’s Local Pack, which is the top three businesses and an interactive map that appears in the SERPs. Here’s what it looks like:
If your financial services firm serves clients in a specific geographic area, whether you’ve got a high-street office or a remote team working across a region, local SEO helps you show up in the right searches from nearby prospects. And it’s one of the quickest ways to attract leads who are ready to take action.
Below are some steps to get local SEO right:
Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP)
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is your local SEO headquarters. 64% of people use it to find a local business’s contact information, making it a primary tool for discovery.
It’s often the first thing people see when they search for financial services companies, and it’s what powers your visibility in Google Maps and the Local Pack.
Start up by claiming your GBP (if you haven’t already), and make sure every field is filled out accurately. That includes:
Your business name (exactly as it appears offline, no stuffing it with keywords!)
Your address and phone number.
Accurate business categories, such as a financial planner or a mortgage broker.
Your operating hours.
A compelling business description.
High-quality photos of your office or team.
The GBP below is a great example of the above criteria. It includes complete and accurate business information, good photos of their team and offices, and product categories:
Get listed in authoritative directories
Google loves consistency, and when your business name, address, and phone number (aka NAP) match across the web, it boosts your credibility and local rankings.
Make sure you’re listed on reputable financial and local directories, including Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, and chambers of commerce. You can also go for industry-specific directories like Unbiased, VouchedFor, or SmartAsset.
Create dedicated location pages
If you serve multiple locations, don’t just lump all that information on your homepage. Instead, create separate, optimized location pages for each area. This is another powerful strategy to boost your local search engine rankings.
This financial services firm serves 12 regions, but they haven’t included all of them on one page. Instead, they’ve created individual pages for each location, with local information, contact details, and an interactive map:
Tracking your SEO performance: How to tell what’s working (and what’s not)
So, you’ve optimized your pages, built some solid backlinks, and used keywords like a pro. Great! But how do you know if it’s all working?
This is where two free tools, Google Search Console and Google Analytics, can help. These tools give you real, measurable insights into how your SEO efforts are performing and where you might need to tweak, test, or totally rethink your approach.
Google Search Console
This tool is like a direct line into what Google sees when it looks at your site. It’s essential for tracking how well your pages are performing in organic search and spotting issues before they become SEO nightmares. With Google Search Console, you can track:
Which keywords are driving organic traffic to your site.
Your average position in organic search results.
Click-through rates from Google.
Technical issues, such as errors or usability problems.
Google Analytics
While Google Search Console shows you what’s happening on the search engine side, Google Analytics gives you the full picture of what happens after someone lands on your site. You can:
Track how many people visit your site and which pages they land on.
See how long they stay and where they leave.
Measure your conversion goals, like contact form submissions or downloads.
Understand traffic sources.
Break down performance by device, location, and demographics.
Trust Us with Your Financial Services Linkbuilding
SEO for financial services isn’t only about driving traffic to your website. It’s about building trust, showcasing authority, and attracting the kinds of clients who convert.
Every part of your SEO strategy should work towards the same goal: making it easy for people and search engines to see the value your firm brings to the table.
Linkbuilding plays a massive role in that process. It powers your authority, pushing your rankings higher and giving Google the green light to take your content seriously.
At LinkBuilder, we know the financial sector comes with high standards. Compliance and accuracy matter. And so does finding link opportunities that are worth it.
Our approach is focused, personalized, and built around building real authority. If you’re looking to boost your visibility and earn links that make an impact, contact LinkBuilder today.
We’re excited to show you how strategic linkbuilding can help your firm show up, stand out, and grow.